GameSalad is a popular games making application for the Mac which recently introduced the ability to produce games for the iPhone. The advantage of using GameSalad is the fact it requires no programming skills whatsoever with a drag-and-drop interface at the heart of the games creation process.

Last month Gendai Games, the developer behind GameSalad, launched the iPhone Early Access Program which allowed developers to sign up for an Indie or Pro license. Both came at a pretty steep price with the Indie license costing $499 a year and the Pro license $1,999. The indie license gave a budding developer everything they would need to get a game on the App Store while Pro opened up an advanced set of features for the more adventurous.

Just over a month later and the early access program has been closed being replaced with the final GameSalad Membership Program. The best news about this is the Indie license has been renamed to Express membership and the annual price has been dropped to just $99 while retaining the same feature set. The Pro membership still exists and keeps its $1,999 price tag.

One question this does raise is did the developers who signed up for the Indie license and paid $499 lose out? Apparently not, as Nestor Hernandez of Gendai Games explains:

The Early Access Program was intended to do just that, provide early access to our iPhone publishing system. With that concluded, we are able to roll out the official title of the membership program and the official price. We understand that the question arises about what happens to those that adopted early. To address this, we’ve already made arrangements with our early members that is very accommodating and generous for them – we’re pretty sure they will agree.

GameSalad is free to use on your Mac allowing interested developers or budding game creators to try out the application before deciding to sign up for an iPhone membership. Taking that next step for $99 gains you access to the GameSalad Viewer and iPhone export service. With Viewer you can send your game to your iPhone wirelessly for testing without the need to learn any of the iPhone SDK tools. Once happy with your creation the export service then allows you to create the finished product ready for submission to the App Store.

With that price drop I believe GameSalad provides the cheapest way possible to create an iPhone game without ever having to write a line of code. Taking into account the cost of signing up to the iPhone Developer Program ($99) you could be creating and selling games on the App Store for an investment of $198. You can’t get much more reasonable than that.

As for the decision to drop the price I think it was the right thing to do. When the early access program started I commented that the pricing was fairly high for what was on offer compared to other all-in-one solutions; and it did act as a barrier to entry. $99 is much more accessible even for a younger audience experimenting with game development who want to see friends playing their creation on an iPhone.

We will soon know how successful the GameSalad membership program has been because the Express level means any game released on the App Store will carry the GameSalad logo as the app loads. If you start seeing that logo a lot then you know Gendai made the right decision dropping the price. Let’s also hope the quality of games remains high and we get a few classics released.